An Immigration Trio

Jeff Sessions is mounting a heroic campaign to persuade Congress to block President Obama’s apparently imminent decree legalizing, in essence, five to six million illegal immigrants by granting them work permits. The Obama administration has been lawless in many ways, but this is stark illegality even by its standards. This is what the actual law says:

INA Sec. 274A– Unlawful Employment of Aliens

(a) Making employment of unauthorized aliens unlawful

(1) In general

It is unlawful for a person or other entity—

(A) to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States an alien knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien (as defined in subsection (h)(3) of this section) with respect to such employment, or

(B)(i) to hire for employment in the United States an individual without complying with the requirements of subsection (b) of this section…

President Obama proposes to nullify the law by executive degree. He has no constitutional power to do so. If the roof were not falling in on America in so many ways, this kind of usurpation would precipitate a constitutional crisis.

Senator Sessions has tirelessly made the legal and policy arguments against the administration’s promotion of illegal immigration, but today he stepped out of character, just for a moment, to note the political consequences of sneering at the will of voters on this topic:

A reader who has been a dogged critic of the illegal immigration celebrationists writes:

And even for America, the influx of millions of new citizens — both the potentially legalized current illegal immigrants and the many others who are likely to come in the wake of the legalization — can affect the society and the political system in considerable ways. It seems to me eminently sensible to be concerned about the illegal immigrants who may well change (in some measure) your country even if your ancestors were themselves…immigrants who changed the country as it once was.

There are two big questions:

(1) What’s in it for us?…..native-born, existing Americans?

ANSWER: Nothing. Actually, worse: grotesque giantism, crowdedness, ecological destruction as future population levels not too far in the future approach those of India and China not so long ago…plus unwanted and unnecessary demographic and cultural change. John O’Sullivan writes:

[M]ost of us faced up honestly to that question a long time ago when the electoral consequences of immigration seemed less immediately threatening than today. Our answers then included the following: Immigration was not necessary for the growth of the U.S. economy; its net economic advantages for native-born Americans were at best nugatory, at worst slightly negative; its fiscal costs outweighed any such advantages; it was reducing the wages and job opportunities of low-paid and poorer Americans, including minority Americans; it was weakening the social bonds of Tocquevillian America; and it was a carrier of multiculturalism which, as Samuel Huntington argued in “Who are We?”, was a kind of program for the deconstruction of America’s national identity.

(2) When did we vote for New Transformed America?

ANSWER: Never. In fact, we have been systematically lied to, misled and deceived by political and media elites acting in bad faith who want unlimited immigration. What we did vote for, a restrictive immigration and labor law regime, has been systematically subverted by an unholy alliance of scofflaw employers, unscrupulous cowardly politicians, crazed ideologues, race hustlers and a feckless MSM all conniving to effect a regime we were told would never come about–all while treating resistance as racism and displaying unbridled contempt for opposition to their connivance.

The current border crisis is only a microcosm of a much broader problem, but it is revealing:

“I don’t usually get into the political part of it,” explained Chris Cabrera, now a vice president in the National Border Patrol Council Local 3307, “but I find it odd that their whole thing is, ‘We are going to get amnesty when we get here. Where is my permiso? Where is my permission to go north so I can get my medical care and my schooling and all that? President Obama is going to take care of us and make sure we’re all OK.’

“Whether it’s the adults or the young kids, one thing we consistently hear is, ‘Obama will take care of us,’” Cabrera said.